Mobile

The mobile editor is becoming an essential position in a 21st century newsroom. (Flickr Photo by Michael Coghlan)

As the number of mobile readers climbs over 50 percent for many newspapers, it is logical that we would infuse mobile thinking throughout the newsroom. Yet, in a majority of newsrooms, the focus is not on mobile. Newsrooms need to start changing this by hiring a mobile editor.

The mobile editor should be sheriff to the news disseminating community. Better yet, the mobile editor should be a sort of traffic cop, directing cars when the traffic lights are malfunctioning. The position should not be a transitional job that may eventually disappear. Quite the contrary, we are witnessing the infancy of that new position in the newsroom. Growth that involves authority and rank is how I see this position developing. Read more

A report from the Pew Research Center released Wednesday shows that smartphone ownership has nearly doubled in recent years as more Americans have come to depend on the devices for access to information about news events.

The report is another thread in the ongoing narrative of the growing importance of mobile devices to the news industry, as readers — and news organizations — increasingly turn to smartphones to access and deliver information. The findings are based on two polls from November 2014 and include information from a survey of more than 2,000 smartphone owners that provides details about how they use their devices.

The big takeaway: A majority of news consumers now use their smartphones to occasionally follow along with breaking news events and stay abreast of goings-on in their respective communities. Read more

Dave Cohn, Former Chief Content Officer for Circa and current Executive Producer at Al Jazeera’s new mobile-centric AJ+ venture, discusses ways smaller journalism organizations can deliver their content to a mobile audience. He talks about the “wide push” to get content out in editions and suggests coming up with a strategy to take advantage third-party apps, like Twitter.

So your news organization now gets the majority of its pageviews through mobile devices. Now what? At the Online News Association conference in Chicago, mobile bosses from The New York Times, CNN and BuzzFeed dispensed tips for boosting mobile growth. Here are four of them.

Become a metric sleuth
One evening earlier this year, CNN saw a confusing uptick in mobile traffic, said Etan Horowitz, senior mobile editor at CNN. The editors were puzzled. Why the sudden spike? Upon further investigation, they realized the pageviews weren’t caused by any stories posted to CNN’s mobile site. Instead, they came from a video of a scary-looking baby terrorizing New Yorkers that had been shared on CNN’s social media accounts.

Sometimes, as in the case of the “Devil Baby,” traffic spikes are one-offs, caused by popular pieces of content.

Today’s multimedia journalists have to do it all on their own – report, write, edit, drive, set up live shots, and post to social media and the Web. Usually, that’s just considered a long list of stuff to do by deadline. But in breaking news coverage, the journalist has some tough choices to make.

The biggest challenge is getting the great video for the story that’s going to air on TV and being the first one to inform news consumers via social media. Here are some strategies to help serve both masters.

Let’s break down these tips into three categories:

What to shoot

Workflow

How to distribute via social media

What to shoot

Shoot the most obvious thing news consumers will recognize right now. After all, we’re talking about breaking news and the situation may change by the time the newscast airs. Read more

Gannett will split publishing, broadcast assets: Its acquistion of broadcast companies and the 73 percent of Cars.com it didn’t own make this “the right time for a separation,” CEO Gracia Martore says in a statement. Robert J. Dickey will run the publishing company, which be called Gannett and will hold USA Today and 81 dailies, plus the U.K.’s Newsquest. (Poynter) | Just yesterday, Ken Doctor asked whether Gannett would be the next big media company to split its assets. (Nieman) | Rick Edmonds explained the rash of splits last week. Newspaper groups can “theoretically do better with management whose exclusive focus is on the particular challenges of that industry,” he wrote. (Poynter)

Let us now observe Rupert Murdoch’s mating dance: Time Warner’s “unyielding stance has at least some analysts wondering if an acquisition really is inevitable,” Jonathan Mahler writes.

Here’s our roundup of the top digital and social media stories you should know about (and from Andrew Beaujon, 10 media stories to start your day, and from Kristen Hare, a world roundup):

— At Poynter, Adam Hochberg explores in depth Gannett’s three-year CMS overhaul to “replace the existing systems and serve every Gannett newsroom – from USA Today to KHOU-TV in Houston to the Fort Collins Coloradoan.”

— Frédéric Filloux runs down three mobile trends to watch for the rest of 2014, including questions about what news sites should do about the market of Android users — which is bigger than the iOS market but less lucrative.

— Joanna Geary, Twitter UK’s head of news, visited the Wall Street Journal in June to share tips on how to use Tweetdeck to gather news. Read more

— Google has notified The Guardian and BBC that certain articles will no longer appear in European searches, Mark Scott writes at The New York Times Bits blog. A European court ruling allows people “to ask for links to information about themselves to be removed from search results.”

— As news organizations fail to take advantage of the surge in mobile ad spending, Poynter’s Rick Edmonds says his hunch “is that getting video right and getting stronger mobile ad performance will go hand in hand for news sites.”

— Facebook drives 25 percent of traffic to Hearst magazines, up from 4 percent last year. Lucia Moses explains the publisher’s new focus on Facebook at Digiday.

Here’s our roundup of the top digital and social media stories you should know about (and from Andrew Beaujon, 10 media stories to start your day, and from Kristen Hare, a world roundup):

— What makes a tweet likely to be retweeted? An algorithm developed at Cornell thinks it knows, and you can test your predictive powers against it in an interactive quiz at The New York Times by Mike Bostock, Josh Katz and Nilkanth Patel.

— According to eMarketer, revenue from smartphone and tablet ads will surpass revenue from radio, magazine and newspaper ads for the first time this year, Robert Hof writes at Forbes. Mobile will still trail television and desktop/laptop ad revenue, though.